Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to man and thus to God!

– Lester DeKoster

Work is more than a necessity; it is a privilege. Work enables us to take part with God in the work of creation. It develops our personality and shapes us into the unique persons which God intends us to become.

The below extracts remind us of this great truth.

Work gets the largest single block of our lives.

Yet we tend to look for meaningful living anywhere but on the job.

We work daily for the paycheck that tries to keep necessity at bay and provides us enough leisure besides to pursue what seems to give meaning to our existence.

Lester DeKoster, Work: The Meaning of your Life

We need to thunder from our pulpits and celebrate at every turn in the life of the church that God is calling people into education, the arts, public office, business, engineering, medicine, the service professions – quite literally into every area and sector of human life. We need to proclaim this truth and celebrate it often because the older, unbiblical notion is so deeply embedded in our corporate consciousness.

Gordon T. Smith, Courage & Calling

Excellence in our work matters because God made us in his image. Human beings carry the imago dei in a way that the rest of creation does not. While the remainder of nature fulfills its role by created instinct, we have a capacity to voluntarily appreciate and imitate God’s excellence. He gave us the ability to choose to do our best. Our work becomes worship when we willfully give out our best every day for the good of those around us through our jobs.

John Maxwell, Life@Work

Our point of greatness is usually found at the intersection of what we are good at what we like to do. Greatness requires both desire and knack. Aspiration without ability will get you nowhere. On the other hand, talent without motivation will never excel either. Greatness is an amalgam of both.

John Maxwell, Life@Work

Work molds: a wilderness into a garden, nature into a city. Human history begins in the Garden of Eden, and culminates in the New Jerusalem; man’s history wends its way from one to the other on the bent backs, active minds, vivid imaginations, and straining sinews of human labor.

Lester DeKoster, Work: The Meaning of your Life

The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work – our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure – and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people. We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?”; of a man, not “what does he make?” but “what is his work  worth?”; of goods, not “Can we induce people to buy them?” but “are they useful things well made?”; of employment, not “how much a week?” but “will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?”

Dorothy Sayers, Why Work?

Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Dorothy Sayers, Why Work?